Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey My rating: 5 of 5 stars There is a moment when I finish a good book that feels like coming up for air after being long underwater. This is especially true of a big book. It’s a baptism of sorts. You don’t know really what you’re getting into….

The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka My rating: 4 of 5 stars One-Straw Revolution is not by any means a gardening book. If you are looking for advice, planting guides, charts, etc, this is not the book for you. I’ve heard the book described as “Zen and the Art of Farming” and that comes closer…

Confession: I don’t read novels anymore. Truth be told, I don’t read any big books anymore. I don’t read ’em on a screen or as a print book. My interaction with words has been reduced to quick articles and short pieces on the interweb. I am sometimes inclined to read more in-depth pieces of the…

In 1995 I was entering my last year of college in the small town of Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and for the first time in my life, I moved into a full-fledged home. Prior to that I had been living in the dormitory. Arkadelphia is timber country. The Ouachita ‘mountains’ are to west, the Ouachita river borders…

Theaster Gates is a badass. He is a visual artist. He is a social critic. He is an urban planner, a teacher, an activist, and a handsome devil. He and I share a birth year (Year of the Ox…represent!) If you don’t know about him, check out of his badass personhood. What I like…

Gao XingJian (高行健) is a Chinese playwright, literary translator, screenwriter, director, painter and novelist. In 2000 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first native born Chinese to win the prize (Pearl S. Buck doesn’t count). Gao is an eccentric motherfucker, and I love him for that. I dig his paintings (google ’em),…

Cleaning up the draft pile, here’s an unfinished review of Wallace’s The Pale King. I wrote this nearly three years ago. I throw it out into the blog ether just for the helluvit. It’s coming up on six months since the release of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous tome The Pale King, and I have yet…

In the summer of ’96 I rambled about the middle states in a red Sentra dubbed the Smoking Section. The SS had a tape deck, and I had three cassette tapes: an audio book of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, an early recording of folk stylist Paul Gubbins, and a rare recording of John Allen Adams reading his…

If my one blog reader is still reading, he or she may remember me mentioning the Chinese Ci poems. 辛弃疾 (xin qiji) was one of the Song poets who wrote some fine Ci poems. And here’s me reading the Xi Jiang Yue.